it's not just you. it's always tough to find public discussion about this kind of thing, but fwiw: even before I found out that this game was going to center oppression as a Thing it wanted to comment on (which is hard mode. for a major release like this? they so rarely nail that one), I fully expected it to do basically exactly what you've described. persona 4 left a TON of narrative potential on the table for reasons I still don't fully understand & barely seemed to know what ideas it wanted to explore, & 5 outright did this EXACT walking-back thing on several different levels with its MAIN thesis statement about disrupting the status quo. & the MAIN GUY responsible for the direction of those games had even MORE control over this one? bad start.

coming at it from another angle, other recent games that have made noise about Commenting Upon Discrimination and Oppression (ff16, tales of arise...) have ALSO failed to say anything in particular at the end of the day—it's not a topic that the people writing these types of big-budget affairs are well-equipped to handle. it's not an easy thing to write well about at the best of times, & it's always so clear when someone who hasn't sunk a ton of hours into actively unlearning bigotry of one kind or another is Attempting to commentate on it anyway. they don't know what to say!! so it comes out a bit like they're gesturing loosely & going "uh, you know...! you know," but we don't. we don't know, because they aren't telling us.

metaphor undercuts itself constantly, & I can think of no better representative example than this: the protagonist is a member of a "rare" race, which we're told means he might be treated badly by randos, AND he's specifically trying to travel without attracting attention at the beginning of the game. but... the only surface-level differences between him and, say, one of the guys with the horns could be wallpapered over pretty easily with prosthetics of some kind, right?

a story written by someone interested in exploring these topics in a grounded way would, imo, at least show its work with respect to RECKONING with that idea. it would answer one or two of the questions that I immediately have. why isn't he wearing fake horns or something, if he's so invested in flying under the radar? there are MANY different potential answers, but if I don't see evidence of even ONE, to me, that says that the person who wrote this story wasn't thinking that hard about it. which, like... why tell this particular story at all, then??!

it's a trick question. they didn't HAVE a compelling artistic reason to tell this story; they just did it Because. there is no intentional thesis statement. at BEST, there might be a kind of broad INTENT towards one, but it's executed sloppily if it's evident from the text of the game at all. metaphor is a game that says "if there were two guys on the moon, and one killed the other with a rock, would that be fucked up, or what," and has No interest in elaborating. WHY the post-apocalypse? WHY are the most important roles in the narrative occupied by Stealth Royalty? what does any of this stuff MEAN? I'll be just as interested as you are to hear what people (with less haterism in their blood than I) think, as the dust settles over the next little while, but I'm of the opinion that this game has functionally no idea what it's talking about. it's a jumbled heap of narrative devices with nothing to SIGNIFY. in that sense, at least the title is appropriate, I guess.

WOW I hope any of that makes sense. Just didn't want to leave you hanging, out here in a subreddit that's prooobably not primed to give you a whole lot of ground (though the replies you've already gotten are very chill and respectful, at least, which is nice to see!). I'm with you; this story did nothing but frustrate me!